Hollywood Patrons Beset by Politicians

Stanley Sheinbaum is a living institution of Hollywood fund-raising, so it’s no surprise to find him at home in Brentwood tonight with Warren Beatty, greeting dozens of deep-pocketed liberals coming to pay homage--and cash--to Robert Reich’s bid for governor of Massachusetts.

Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Beatty’s wife, actress Annette Bening, are schmoozing as Reich holds court. The foyer table is littered with name tags for people such as actor-director Rob Reiner and director Paul Schrader. “MASH” alumnus Mike Farrell walks in, but Barbra Streisand has failed to show, and someone is loudly deriding the “low celebrity wattage.”

Not enough celebrities?

Maybe that’s because another political premiere--a gay rights dinner honoring Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)--is opening across town. Ellen DeGeneres and “Sex and the City” star Kim Cattrall are there, mingling with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Gov. Gray Davis.

It’s political fund-raising season again.

A time when leaders of the Free World descend on Los Angeles for that high-stakes trick-or-treat of cocktails, banquets and power brunches.

When phones ring with pleas for $1,000-a-seat soirees for senators with presidential aspirations. And these days the dinners for national candidates are on a collision course with fund-raisers for California primary contenders.

There are only so many rainmakers--and it’s pouring.

“I am just inundated with requests,” said Sheinbaum, a silver-haired raconteur with a colorful youth who, at 81, still seems anything but avuncular.

“Right now I’m in a fight with John Kerry. I love John Kerry,” he said of the Massachusetts senator. “But Kerry wants me to do a fund-raiser, and it turns out I’m doing one the same day for Robert Reich.”

During last week’s congressional recess, this lament became a refrain.

“We’re mad at the Lieberman people,” said a political consultant after another head-on collision with operatives for Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.).

“It’s like everyone in Washington has descended on us. It’s wild,” said Casey Wasserman, the young gun of a Hollywood dynasty built by his grandfather, studio chief Lew Wasserman.

“You name it, they’re all here,” said Haim Saban, who has helped raise millions for Democratic causes and was just named finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “They’re all on top of the other. It’s a very, very, very busy season.”

Fund-raisers are beset, besieged--and unrepentant.

“You have to raise the money,” said Beatty, whose on-screen alter ego, Sen. Jay Bulworth, mounted a rapping kamikaze run against big money and politics.

In real life, Beatty flirted with a run for president, and tonight he is a co-host of the Sheinbaum affair.

“This is what you are subjected to if you’re running for office,” Beatty said as guests milled around him. “That’s why there should be public financing of campaigns.”

If fund-raising hosts are a longtime pillar of campaign financing, they may also be the wave of its future.

If campaign finance is reformed, it would reduce the power of individual contributors, who would no longer be allowed to write unlimited “soft money” checks.

But the power of the rainmakers--people who know lots of people who will give $1,000 to their favorite candidates--will grow.

L.A. Picks Up the Slack From New York

David Rosen, a Democratic fund-raiser who was finance director of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, said Los Angeles is “picking up the slack” from a slowdown in New York fund-raising after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“A large percentage of the Democratic dollar is from New York, and it was seen as crass to go after the donor dollar there,” Rosen said. “People kind of felt, ‘Go get your dollars in Los Angeles while New York recoups.’”

So as elected officials in Washington debate the Shays-Meehan bill--which could cap soft money donations--their staffers are reaching out to Los Angeles hosts.

“Just the other day a senator called me who wants to raise money for six years hence,” said Sheinbaum, who encouraged Bill Clinton to make his first presidential run and raised six figures to help him along.

“The amounts have just skyrocketed, and the competition is huge,” he said. “So you get in there early, and you scare off the competition. Look at Gray Davis: He’s been raising money since he got elected.”

Sheinbaum is in his dining room, framed by an enormous blue Robert Motherwell abstract. He flips through a typed list of political events he is invited to. He wonders aloud: How do Washington politicians find time to meet constituents? When he was a kid, politicians picnicked with voters.

“Now, they don’t even go to kaffeeklatsches anymore,” he said. “On a face-to-face basis, who do they see? Haim Saban, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Lew Wasserman. That’s one of the reasons Democrats have become increasingly conservative. It’s why people have developed an aversion to politicians--and not without some reason.”

So Many Events, So Little Time

A few days after the Sheinbaum affair, the political decathlon started to rival the Winter Olympics.

House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) was one of seven congressmen attending a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fund-raiser where donors paid from $500 for guests to $2,500 for chairmen (“Yes, I want to take back the House!” pledge cards trumpeted ).

Gephardt headlined an overlapping event later that night at a Bel-Air home where Ray Charles, Whoopi Goldberg and Roseanne Barr performed. Guests were asked to “please join” Goldberg--along with Norman Lear--at another overlapping reception across town honoring John Garamendi and his bid for California insurance commissioner ($500-$10,000).

That same Wednesday night, more than 50 people paying $1,000 each somehow managed to make it over to the home of radio syndication mogul Norm Pattiz to support to Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

It is no secret that Hollywood fund-raisers are not just an all-access backstage pass to politics, but a place where people can network with potential patrons of their television pilots.

Warner Bros. chief Alan Horn and his wife, Cindy--who also sponsored the Garamendi event--held a fund-raiser Feb. 12 for Los Angeles City Council candidate Wendy Greuel.

Guests sipped white wine and perused the Horns’ collection of paintings of Indians on horseback by Western masters such as Remington and Russell. Greuel, a former DreamWorks SKG executive, spoke of how she would work to keep film production in town.

Kansas Insurance Commissioner Kathleen Sebelius moved through the room, passing her card around and telling people of her planned run for governor of Kansas.

“We’d like to have her come back and do fund-raisers sometime in April,” said Beverly Thomas, a friend, as she handed out invitations for a get-acquainted gathering for Sebelius the next night.

Some fund-raisers, like Pattiz, view their longtime support for local and national candidates as a civic responsibility. If people don’t contribute money to candidates and causes they believe in, he reasons, who could afford to run for office? Multimillionaires?

Pattiz, chairman of Westwood One, never finished college, but he did build an extremely successful radio syndication empire. And he is among the people whose names surface and resurface on fund-raiser invitations.

“There’s a lot of networking that goes on,” he said. “Often the way to get the most bang for your buck is to support the candidates and causes of your friends who all support your candidates and causes. I know I can count on Haim Saban.”

Politicians often come out to Los Angeles for informal visits between fund-raising stints, Pattiz said.

“It’s not like they’re expecting you to write a check at that moment,” he said. “If they need fund-raising help, they can pick up the phone. It’s a lot easier for them to ask for your support if they’ve already met you.”

Pattiz got into politics 20 years ago as a supporter of Edward Kennedy. He also began writing checks for a little-known assemblyman: Gray Davis--and eventually, lending his name to fund-raisers.

Same Names Pop Up in Tight-Knit Community

The fact that the same names keep popping up on fund-raiser invitations makes them interesting little documents of Los Angeles politics.

The Horns co-chaired a Dec. 12 Democratic Party event honoring 11 U.S. senators at the home of supermarket baron Ron Burkle. So did the Sabans and Streisand ($100,000 for event chair, $50,000 for vice chair, $25,000 for co-chair or $10,000 a couple).

An “Andrew Cuomo for Governor” fund-raiser Jan. 10 ($5,000 a couple) counted among its co-chairs Lew and Casey Wasserman, DreamWorks political czar Andy Spahn, music czar Irving Azoff and television syndication czar Michael King.

Behind the interchangeable names is a tight-knit Westside milieu with the kind of nightly cocktail party contact more familiar to Manhattan than Los Angeles County.

It is in this world that Gray Davis and one of his Republican opponents, Richard Riordan, make their home. So when Davis ads attack Riordan for his past opposition to abortion, mutual friends in both camps cringe.

“They have the same friends. They’re all at the same dinners,” said a woman who is prominent in this world.

Collective social life marches bravely forward. Nancy Daly Riordan was at an annual all-women’s dance party. So was Gray Davis’ wife, Sharon. The Sabans, supporters of Davis, invited the Davises and the Riordans to their son’s bar mitzvah a few weeks ago.

It looks even cozier on paper.

Billionaire Eli Broad has taken family vacations with Riordan. Haim Saban once went to Israel on a taxpayer-supported trip hosted by Gray Davis. Nancy Daly Riordan is a Democratic Party rainmaker who has contributed to Davis. So has her husband.

Sharon Davis used to run a Burkle foundation. Former studio chief Frank Biondi and his wife, Carol, who support Riordan, are a Democratic power couple who bade farewell to the Clinton presidency at Camp David--along with Burkle and the Sabans.

This cast might seem as confusing as a Russian novel. But all these names reside in the Palm Pilots of Democratic Party operatives. One name they flip to often is Casey Wasserman.

Wasserman is the grandson of the legendary mogul Lew Wasserman, who led Hollywood into a new era of political activism when he began hosting fund-raisers for John F. Kennedy.

Casey was playing golf with Bill Clinton at the Hillcrest Country Club by the time he was 23. GQ magazine called him a “princeling.”

When Wasserman was 18, Patrick Kennedy--then a young Rhode Island state legislator--called his grandfather and asked him to hold a fund-raiser.

The elder Wasserman told him: “You should really talk to my grandson, because he’s much closer to you in age.”

Kennedy is now a Rhode Island congressman. A few days ago Casey Wasserman co-hosted a cocktail reception, with Kennedy as guest of honor, at the Sabans’.

“It’s kind of like osmosis,” Wasserman said.

If Hollywood’s most visible contribution to the political process is “The West Wing,” Stanley Sheinbaum was one of the early pioneers of the kind of liberal clout now considered synonymous with Hollywood. Sheinbaum once belonged to a group of activists known as the Malibu Mafia.

So did Beatty, and when he and Bening step out of a long black car in front of Sheinbaum’s house, it’s easy to see how the term “limousine liberal” was coined--and how it became an institution.

“Warren Beatty wouldn’t come unless I let him introduce the speaker,” Sheinbaum is telling his guests. “At that point, the speaker almost didn’t come.” Everybody laughs.

Beatty quipped back, calling Sheinbaum “Chekhovian,” and looking around for Sheinbaum’s wife, the former Betty Warner.

“Betty,” he says, “I don’t need to tell you that if I were dumped tomorrow by Annette, I would be here trying to make as much trouble as possible between you and Stanley.”

More laughter.

By the end of the night, the Reich campaign was $40,000 richer.